For the past few years, Node.js, accounting for its growth and popularity, has been a talking point for some time now. Well-establish companies like Walmart and PayPal have adapted it, making it one of the most recognized languages at present. However, as many other platforms, Node.js faces a lot of development problems that includes crucial mistakes committed by the developers themselves. This article details out the top 5 common mistakes that the developers are guilty of committing often.

Blocking The Event Loop

Being a single-threaded environment, Node.js makes sure that, no part of run in a parallel. To achieve the concurrency I/O bound operations are handled asynchronously. But this leads to the blocking of the event loop as thousands of clients are connected to it. There is no a clear-cut solution to this problem, other than to address each case individually.

Initiating Multiple Callbacks

Relying on callbacks is what JavaScript has done forever. In Node.js, callbacks are the only way to make asynchronous elements of the code to communicate with each other. This will be the norm, at least till further enhancements are done. The package developers are also more inclined to design their APIs around the callbacks. With such great importance, the vital error that happens is using a callback more than once. Just being a bit more careful, developers can avoid this critical error.

Deeper Nesting Of Callbacks

Nesting callback so deep is not exactly a Node.js issue, but may cause problems, making the code spin out of control in a short span of time. It gets worse with the complexity of the task. Nesting callbacks in this way will end up with a hard-to-read, hard-to-maintain and error-filled code. One feasible solution is to declare these tasks as small functions and then later link them all up.

Assuming The Callbacks Will Run Synchronously

The USP of JavaScript and Node.Js, that lead to their success and popularity is the process of asynchronous programming with callbacks. With regards to other programming languages, it's easy to predict that two statements will execute one after another automatically unless some special instruction is provided to jump between statement. However is Node.js, that uses callbacks, a single task may not perform well until the previous task is finished. Node.js developers have to make sure, the next task that has to happen after the call, has to be invoked from within it.

Not Testing The Application Enough

Assuming that the application is “done” before running multiple tests on them is considered as a cardinal sin. With the availability of multiple testing tools at the disposal of the developers, there is really no excuse for not testing.

Final Words

By now, it's clear that these mistakes may cause devastating effects on the program. Node.js had made it extremely easy for beginners to learn and get started, but there are areas, where things can be easily messed up. Avoiding these crucial mistakes will let the developers to extract all the advantages, Node.js has to offer.